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So what difference has it made?
Channel 4’s history is of ups and downs, declares David Self
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A Licence to be Different: The story of Channel 4
BFI £16 (978-1-84457-205-2) Church Times Bookshop £14.40 IF THE BBC is the Established Church, and ITV an excitable, unpredictable Pentecostal organisation, then Channel 4 might be compared to an off-the-wall sect. An unlikely product of the Thatcher years, it was given a licence to be different, and largely absolved of money worries: ITV would fund it in return for any profit from its advertising slots. Founded 25 years ago with this mandate to be “innovative, culturally diverse and educative”, it started with high ambitions. Unlike the three other channels, it was to be a publisher, not a production house: it would commission programmes from outside sources. In its early years, under its first chief executive (Jeremy Isaacs), “a thousand flowers bloomed” — together with many weeds. Under his savvy successor Michael Grade (now in charge of ITV), it became more worldly. Headlines were made by such episodes as “the body under the patio” in Brookside, and the infamous red triangle indicating “discretion required” by viewers, together with some sexually explicit programmes. Michael Grade was dubbed Britain’s pornographer-in-chief. More important, he oversaw Channel 4’s development in 1993 into a public corporation, without shareholders and responsible for its finances. Its subsequent reliance on shows such as Big Brother (which, in some years, has generated half the channel’s income), Wife Swap, and the chef Gordon Ramsey’s The F Word suggests that some idealism has been lost in the process — even if the network still deserves praise for its patronage of British film-makers, its telling documentaries, and, not least, the highly respected nightly Channel 4 News. It is this story that the media commentator Maggie Brown tells in her voluminous, very detailed, and objective history of a peculiarly British institution. Jeremy Isaacs decreed that, in keeping with its remit to be different, there would be no religious programmes on Sundays. Nevertheless, Channel 4 has commis-sioned some of the most important religious documentaries of the past few decades (especially in its now defunct Witness strand), though the casual viewer is unlikely to deduce that its present chief executive, Andy Duncan, is a prayerful Evangelical Christian who attends a Baptist church in Croydon. What is more surprising is that few Christian programme-makers have been hammering on the doors of the channel’s commissioning editors, eager to reach its target audience of 20- and 30-year-olds. David Self formerly lectured in drama at St Hild and St Bede College, Durham. To order this book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price") |
